Anna

Directors Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli made a film set in the Roman counterculture of the 1970s (so it is not about the everyday life of the middle class). The underground content - discussions with friends about politics, open sexual relationships, clashes with the police, demonstrations, and life in a semi-legal state, on the streets - intertwines with an equally independent underground form that blurs the line between fiction and reality. The central plot, revolving around a segment of the life of a sixteen-year-old (approximately) prostitute picked up from the street by an altruistic forty-year-old, is set within an overall framework that at times resembles not only Cinema vérité, but also the "revolutionary" European cinema à la the Dziga Vertov group, meaning the breaking down of the wall between the actor and the character, the film crew and the world being filmed, the application of collective decision-making, etc. The viewer, in fact, almost never knows whether they are watching a staged, improvised, spontaneous/"documentary" scene, whether they are following the character or the actor who is already "playing" themselves and dealing with their own personal matters with another "character." In this aspect, as well as in its focus on the character of the modern young woman, the film resembles (a much more independent hippie) a version of I Am Curious (Yellow), and I Am Curious (Blue) by Vilgot Sjöman. (04/08/2016)